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Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Motorcycle Diaries, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Class Consciousness
Suppression and Reclamation of Indigenous Culture
Medicine, Politics, and Helping Others
Growing Up
Individuality vs. Ideology
Summary
Analysis
The men visit two older doctors, friends of Alberto. Both visits are unsatisfying: one friend has an unpleasant wife who is clearly suspicious of their itinerant lifestyle and worried about their influence on her husband, and the other friend is highly involved with the Radical Party, which Ernesto considers to be an outdated and ridiculous political movement. Ernesto is anxious to avoid following the life paths of either of these men.
By visiting men who are medical professionals, Ernesto and Alberto see two paths down which their own lives could lead them. They are repulsed by the personal and political lives of bourgeois professionals, even though they themselves are preparing to become these professionals.
Themes
When Ernesto and Alberto depart from these friends, they leave civilization behind as well, sleeping in the open air and eating cheaply on their meager budget. La Poderosa turns out to be prone to accidents and often hinders their progress. Still, they are happy to be liberated from the confines of the conventional lifestyle that seems so unappealing to them.
Ernesto and Alberto are starting to become more comfortable with embracing chance and hardship than staying within the confines of bourgeois life. They were always ambivalent about bourgeois life, but now they seem more settled into the prospect of rejecting it.
Themes
